Missing You Is Grey
by MintSauce
Summary: Missing you is grey like I've never known. Remembering you hurts in a way I never imagined


**This may be part of a series, just so you know! We'll see. Thank you to Michelle for betaing and the lovely Billie for reading it through :P**

_**Missing you was grey like I'd never known….**_

If Mickey believed in that sort of thing, then he'd probably have to admit that Gallagher was the closest thing that he could ever have hoped to have to a soul mate. So in some twisted sort of way, he thinks it makes sense that he can feel it right down to his bones.

It's in the middle of the night and he arches up off his mattress, breath gasping out of him like he's drowning. And he feels hollow, like a part of him is missing. And even though he hadn't felt completely whole in a long time, somehow it's still a different sort of empty. The worst sort.

His heart's beating too fast in his chest, thundering against his rib cage in a way that hurts and he just _knows_. He can't explain it, but he just does.

And he's alone lying on a grubby mattress in the apartment that's too empty even though he's lived in it for three years now. He's on his own, like he has been for a long time now, but all of a sudden that loneliness feels like he's suffocating him.

He drinks himself back to sleep with cheap whisky that he'd had stashed away as though he was fucking waiting for this moment. And when he hears for sure a few days later, when the news spreads through their neighbourhood in a sad sort of whisper, Mickey isn't even surprised.

"Have a fucking heart, Mickey!" Mandy snaps at him when she tells him and all he does is stare blankly at her. He doesn't know what to say that isn't a confession of how his heart just got blown up by a fucking roadside bomb, so he's sorry if he isn't really capable of acting like a fully functioning human being right now. He doesn't know how to say that, doesn't trust himself to open his mouth.

So he just flips her off and walks out, heads down to the Alibi and downs shots one after another until everything feels numb and Kev pushes him out of the door so that he won't puke inside.

He doesn't go to the funeral, but when the obituary is posted in the newspaper, shitty little picture of Gallagher grinning and all, Mickey cuts it out and tortures himself with looking at it over and over again. He stares at Ian's stupid, frozen smiling face until bile rises in his throat and his chest feels too tight. He tries to throw it away a few times, crumples up Gallagher's smile and tosses him, but he only ends up smoothing the picture out over his knee three hours later and falling asleep with his fingertips splayed wide over the image.

"Mickey, when the fuck was the last time you ate?" Mandy asks him when she sees him, nose crinkling at the stink of his apartment. He doesn't know if he let her in or if she just strode straight in herself. "Don't tell me you've been blowing all your cash on fucking drugs."

And actually, Mickey can't even remember the last time he went to work and actually earned some money. He definitely can't remember the last time he lined his stomach with something that wasn't alcoholic.

"Fuck off," he tells her, but doesn't complain when she takes him around to her place and makes him gulp down a bowl of scalding, tasteless soup. He doesn't feel the burn, because all of him is still far too numb for that.

Of course, it all comes back up again when she clicks on the TV and it's accidentally playing some old home video.

Gallagher's smile fills the screen just the same as the sound of his laugh fills Mickey's head and Mickey can't tear his eyes away even as he's retching. He wants to. _Fuck_ how he wants to. But he can't, just like he can't throw out that stupid obituary picture. Because Mickey fucked up the only good times he could have had, and he never even fucking realised that until the breath was crushed out of him in the middle of a night on a Monday.

He didn't realise how much he could have missed Gallagher's stupid fucking laugh. Maybe because he didn't ever realty consider the fact that he'd have to.

And shit, he'd said that out loud and now Mandy was staring at him with a look on her face that was part confusion and part realisation and it hurts to look at in a way that's different from how it hurts to look at Ian's face.

And he's still crouched there on the floor, sick puddled in front of him, soaking into the carpet and he can taste salt on his tongue which he's pretty sure means that he's crying. He can't remember how to work his muscles, even though he wants to run from that look on Mandy's face and from the truth that he's going to have to explain. He can't run because he's still watching Ian laughing on the screen.

He can't stop memorising the curve of his smile and the constellation of freckles on his face, the way his fingers curled around the neck of a bottle and how his lips shaped words Mickey couldn't hear over the ringing in his ears. He can't stop staring, because it had taken until right then to realise that actually, he had never forgotten a single one of those things about Ian in the first place. He'd memorised them all too well the first time around.

Because regardless of whether or not he believed in such a thing as soul mates, he still knew that when Gallagher flew off to war, he took all the important parts of Mickey Milkovich with him.


End file.
